The Horrors of Haircut Day
by CosmicKitten89
Summary: Bowser decides that he's had enough of Kooky's tangled mop top.  Please read, very funny!  My sister's been begging me to publish this...
1. Torture Time!

(Disclaimer: I do not own anything in this story.)

Kooky was in a pink room wearing a pink dress. He was sitting at a tea table with a stuffed animal at each seat. His four-year-old little sister Wendy was running a jeweled pink hairbrush through his hair.

"Oh, Ludwig… I wish I had long pretty hair like you…"

The bristles were soft, so they didn't tug at the painful sticky snaggles where Ludwig had gotten candy in his hair.

Wendy put a couple of barrettes in his hair and put the brush down so that she could pour out the tea. Ludwig toddled over to the electronic keyboard that he had been playing on and began to play out the melody he had been contemplating while patiently putting up with Wendy playing makeover doll on him.

"No, no, Luddy, no piano until after the tea party," Wendy told him, grabbing him by the hair and putting him back in his seat.

Wendy snapped when Ludwig insisted on helping himself to the sugar and insisted that he ask for the sugar to be passed to him.

"Noooo…!" Wendy shouted in response to Ludwig's atrocious table manners as he dipped his cookie into the tea, getting tea splattered all over the pastel pink tablecloth, crunched down his cookie with his mouth open, spitting crumbs everywhere that he later snatched up, and slurped down the tea noisily, accompanying it with a belch.

"KOOKY, WHERE ARE YOU? IT'S TORTURE TIME!"

"IN HERE KING DADDY!" shouted Wendy.

Ludwig threw off his barrettes and stripped off the dress and ran out of the bedroom, praying that he wouldn't run into his father King Bowser.

But it was too late. Ludwig heard his father's thunderous footsteps to the left of Wendy's bedroom door, and when he turned around, he saw his father running toward him, with the instrument of torture in his hand.

Ludwig began to run down the hallway, but he was too fat and slow from his diet of gourmet junk food that he was no match against the speed of his father.

"AAAAUUUGH! WHY COULDN'T YOU JUST THROW ME IN THE DUNGEON!" Ludwig shouted German obscenities as Bowser ran the comb through the tangles, burrs and rat's nests, pulling out large amounts of blue troll hair that got caught in the comb.

"Holy Dark Land, Ludwig, a candy cane? You've got to be kidding me…"

Ludwig grabbed for an old French fry that Bowser threw out of his hair. Bowser swore as he pulled a sucker stick out of one of the tangles.

"I can't handle this, son. I'm going to have to call a professional."

Bowser took out his giant-sized 1980s cell phone, which he had customized to have his face logo on it. "Hello, Kiddie Cutz? I would like to make an appointment for my son… actually, for four of my sons…"

Ludwig's eyes popped out in horror. A day at the beauty shop was bound to be torturous. They would wash his hair… Ludwig cringed at the thought of a strange beautician's claws lathering his hair up. Ludwig never bathed, let alone shampooed, unless his father or one of the servants forcibly scrubbed him down. Even in Austria, though his mother expected him to be reasonably presentable to attend university, social events or to play concert piano, it simply wasn't the culture among the Koopas there to be bothered by B.O. or to practice hygiene beyond that which was required to not succumb to infection or filth-related disease.

And then they would take out the comb and the scissors, maybe the electric razor…

Considering the longer-term consequences… what would he look like? Would they give him a stupid Mohawk like his brothers Larry, Lemmy and Iggy? Would they shave him bald like his brothers Roy and Morton and his sister Wendy (all three of whom missed out on the hair gene that Koopas must have in order to grow hair)? Or would he look completely different and worse altogether? This hairstyle might be messy, but it was_ him_. Despite his young age, Ludwig was mentally mature enough to understand the importance of expressing one's personal style and individuality. How_ dare_ his father try to hack it all away from him!


	2. Kiddie Cutz

Bowser took the four of his children that actually have the hair gene into his Bowser Jeep and drove into town, laughing as he nearly ran over the Troopa denizens.

Ludwig squirmed in his seat. Iggy and Lemmy were clueless. Larry was anxious to get a cool haircut.

Bowser brought them over to Kiddie Cutz, the same hair cut place where he took them last time. Ludwig, of course, had evaded that last trip, since that trip had been voluntary.

"Aww, man, I wanted to go to the grownup salon this time!" whined Larry.

"King Daddy, where are we?" asked Lemmy.

Bowser said, "We're at the hair cutting salon. You guys are going to get a haircut!"

Iggy's eyes widened with horror, as did Lemmy's, as he stepped back and crashed into his bespectacled brother. They had confused their last memory of going to Kiddie Cutz with their memory of going to the dentist. Iggy started whimpering, and when Lemmy burst into tears, Iggy copied him by bawling as well.

"Shut up, my boys, it's gonna be all right," Bowser said. "Just hang tough. Your big brother Kooky's going in first. He needs it the most, see? You are gonna be brave boys like your big brother."

Kooky did not feel like a brave boy. His eyes were wider and more panicked-looking than if he had stayed up for two weeks straight and had just drunken a gallon of espresso (neither of which was an uncommon for him to do). The only reason he didn't fight and scream was because he wanted to set a good example for the young twins.

"All right… Who's first?" said the beautician, a Rex lady from Dinosaur Land with a tottering walk and singsong, drawled-out, slurry speech.

Bowser prodded Kooky, who walked without enthusiasm over to the barber's chair.

"How beautiful… what pretty hair!" The beautician was fingering his hair, stroking it and squeezing it as though Kooky's hair were the fur of a cuddly kitten.

Larry was fidgeting, and Bowser had a hard time holding on to his antsy twins.

"I'm going to take your brothers out for a walk. I'll be right back."

Bowser walked out of the salon to bring his young boys out to burn some energy, leaving Ludwig all alone with the crazy hair cutting lady.

"Such a pretty girl… so pretty…"

The beautician threw Ludwig's head into the sink, banging it on accident. She dumped an entire bottle of expensive orchid-scented shampoo on his tangled mess and scrubbed her claws through it roughly, making Ludwig scream, although his screams were muffled from being suffocated in the sink.

Ludwig tried to fight back, but the lady was too strong, although it felt like she was about to fall into the sink any minute as well.

The lady failed to scrub his hair thoroughly, and before she had even rinsed all of the shampoo out she put Ludwig's hair in the hair dryer. She turned it on so hot that Ludwig got burned, and he could smell the smoke from the candy that was combusting in his hair.

Ludwig's hair was even messier looking than ever. The lady wobbled around on her feet while slowly combing his hair. Thanks to her laziness, the combing wasn't painful, except at times when it felt like she was yanking his hair out by the roots at the tangles, whenever she got preoccupied by a snag.

Later, the lady put the comb down, and it felt to Ludwig like she was wrapping his hair around her fingers. She kept on yanking his head back whenever he turned it around to see what she was up to.

"You look sooo pretty in theeeessse…."

When the lady was done, she held a mirror in front of Ludwig so she could see all the pink ribbons she had tied in his hair.

"Those pink ribbons look sooo lovely in your hair, young lady…"

_Wait until King Dad gets a load of this_, Ludwig thought.

Meanwhile, Bowser had stopped at a convenience store after taking his hyper kids out for a walk in the park. He was just there to get a Koopa Cola for himself, wanting to wait until everybody had gotten a haircut to get them all a treat, when Lemmy started screaming,

"King Daddy! I want the teddy bear candy!"

"Hip, for crying out loud, you can have candy after Kooky's done with his hair cut!"

Lemmy started whining loudly, and Iggy joined in.

"All right, all right! But you better share with Larry and save some for Ludwig."

"I don't want any," said Larry, pouting. He was too angry about having to have his hair cut at the kiddie place again.

"Well, you better save for Ludwig, you know he'll be wanting some."

Bowser bought them a large (but not family-size) pack of gummi bears. Iggy spat out his first gummi bear, since it was hard to chew, but Lemmy encouraged him to eat them, so Iggy started swallowing them whole.

When Bowser brought his boys back to Kiddie Cutz, he roared in rage at the lady when he saw Ludwig.

"YOU IDIOT! CAN'T YOU SEE HE IS A BOY!"

Bowser cursed and nearly attacked the lady before taking his boys out of Kiddie Cutz and driving to another haircutting place.

"Well, boys, this appears to be the only other open haircutting place in town."

"A grownup place, right?" asked Larry. But when he saw what the place looked like, he got scared, and wished that King Dad had stuck to the kiddie place.

Ludwig wasn't too thrilled. After having endured all that scalp torture, he still hadn't had his hair properly washed, combed, or cut, and now he was going to have all that done again at this grubby old-fashioned looking place, with the blood-striped pole ominously swirling around, known as the Hair Saloon.


	3. The Hair Saloon

The Hair Saloon looked as old-fashioned on the inside as it did on the outside. The walls were brown, there were were pictures of cowboys on the walls, and there was an ancient radio in the corner playing Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire."

Iggy and Lemmy were crying at the sound of the deep-voiced old-fashioned country song.

"King Dad, I don't want a cowboy haircut," whined Larry.

Ludwig stared at the barber as though he were his executioner.

The barber appeared to be a former Sledge Brother, large and grimy-looking, with five-o'clock shadow on his face. He spat in a spittoon and drew a rusty-looking piece of razor blade out of an even rustier metal cup.

Ludwig had not been so nervous to sit in a chair since last time he was taken to the dentist, which resulted in a very painful root canal for him. Bowser grabbed him and held him down as he screamed at the thought of having his hair butchered by this grubby guy and his unsterilized equipment.

"King Dad, please! If he cuts me I'll contract tetanus! AAAHH!"

The barber yanked at his hair and hacked at it with the dull blade, resulting in uneven cuts.

"Don't you ever sharpen that thing?"

Ludwig screamed and swore as the barber pulled at his hair harder, the hair too tough for the oxidized bit of iron.

"Have you never heard of scissors?"

Soon the floor beneath the chair was covered with piles and piles of feathery blue hair clippings. Ludwig's hair was in the style of an uneven crew cut, and he refused to look in the cracked and dirty mirror that the barber insisted on shoving in his face.

The barber dipped the blade back into the rusty cup right before spitting in it.

Ludwig roared in agonized anger as the barber started to scrape his scalp with the blade.

"Why don't you shave your own head, scuzzball!"

Bowser looked angrier the more Ludwig mouthed off to the barber.

"Now, that wasn't so bad, was it?" said Bowser when Ludwig was finally released from the torture.

"Yes, King Dad, it WAS that bad! Look at my scalp! I am probably infected!"

Ludwig's scalp was a failed attempt to completely shave him bald. Tufts of blue hair stuck out at random areas, and the rest was maimed by moist scars that had bits of blue peach fuzz stuck to them.

Lemmy, Iggy and even Larry cried and hid behind their father.

"Look at that, father, now they are scarred for life! You will never have an easy time taking them to get their hair cut again!"

"Well, theirs isn't nearly as bad as yours. I can easily do theirs at home."

Ludwig groaned and rubbed his scalp. It stung when he touched it. He imagined how his classmates, who already regarded him as an outcast, would react.

_Luckily, he didn't shave off any brain,_ he thought, _for I might have a solution…_


End file.
